Publications

Rivet is the first fully-featured, browser-agnostic remote debugger for web applications. Using Rivet, developers can inspect and modify the state of live web pages that are running inside unmodified end-user web browsers. This allows developers to explore real application bugs in the context of the actual machines on which those bugs occur. To make an application Rivet-aware, developers simply add the Rivet JavaScript library to the client-side portion of the application. Later, when a user detects a problem with the application, the user informs Rivet; in turn, Rivet pauses the application and notifies a remote debug server that a debuggable session is available. The server can launch an interactive debugger front-end for a human developer, or use Rivet’s live patching mechanism to automatically install a fix on the client or run diagnostics for offline analysis. Experiments show that Rivet imposes negligible overhead during normal application operation. At debug time, Rivet’s network footprint is small, and Rivet is computationally fast enough to support non-trivial diagnostics and live patches.

Today’s web applications run inside a complex browser environment that is buggy, ill-specified, and implemented in different ways by different browsers. Thus, web applications that desire robustness must use a variety of conditional code paths and ugly hacks to deal with the vagaries of their runtime. Our new exokernel browser, called Atlantis, solves this problem by providing pages with an extensible execution environment. Atlantis defines a narrow API for basic services like collecting user input, exchanging network data, and rendering images. By composing these primitives, web pages can define custom, high-level execution environments. Thus, an application which does not want a dependence on Atlantis’ predefined web stack can selectively redefine components of that stack, or define markup formats and scripting languages that look nothing like the current browser runtime. Unlike prior microkernel browsers like OP, and unlike compile-to-JavaScript frameworks like GWT, Atlantis is the first browsing system to truly minimize a web page’s dependence on black box browser code. This makes it much easier to develop robust, secure web applications.